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Katharine Hepburn: African Queen
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One of the last true Hollywood stars, Katharine Hepburn worked until she was in her 80s. She won an unprecedented four Oscars and starred in films such as The African Queen, and The Philadelphia Story and On Golden Pond. Always free-spirited and outspoken she was greatly admired as an actress and as a woman.
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Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Hepburn became fascinated with acting at an early age. She appeared in student productions at Bryn Mawr College and pursued a professional stage career after graduating. She scored a notable success on Broadway in 1932 in The Warrior's Husband and was offered a motion-picture contract from the RKO studio. Hepburn demanded $1,500 a week, considered an outrageous sum for a young actor at the time, but the studio agreed. She made her screen debut in the hit A Bill of Divorcement (1932), won her first Academy Award for best actress for Morning Glory (1933), and ... appeared in the box-office smash Little Women (1933). Other prominent Hepburn roles included Alice Adams (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Stage Door (1937), Holiday (1938), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940, after appearing in the stage version and buying the film rights), Woman of the Year (1942), State of the Union (1948), Adam's Rib (1949), The African Queen (1951), Pat and Mike (1952), Summertime (1955), and The Rainmaker (1956).
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Not to worry: Hepburn had Barry write her a fat Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story. She secured the movie rights, persuaded MGM to make it with her as the star and got pleasantly pawed by Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Hepburn was back to stay. But Barry's plot had given producers a naughty idea. If they couldn't tame Kate by breaking her will or scaring her off, they would put their annoyance with her airs in the script. From then on, many of her films — Woman of the Year, The African Queen, The Rainmaker — are about the coarsening or humanizing of Hepburn by some rough all-American Joe.
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[W]here his father, the Reverend Sewell S. Hepburn, originally from Missouri, had come to be an Episcopal clergyman. Of Scottish descent, the Hepburns could trace their ancestry back to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. "Tom" Hepburn had graduated from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, and, in 1901 when he met Kit Houghton, was a graduate student at John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. Tom Hepburn was so much an original that Kit told her sister just after having been introduced to him--"That's the one!"
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Two years later, Hepburn received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special Program (Drama or Comedy) for Love Among the Ruins, which co-starred friend Sir Laurence Olivier and was directed by George Cukor. Hepburn ... appeared with John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, which was essentially The African Queen done as a western. Hepburn won her fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond (1981), opposite Henry Fonda. In 1994, Hepburn gave her final three movie performances—One Christmas, based on a short story by Truman Capote, as Ginny in the remake of Love Affair; and This Can't Be Love, directed by one of her close friends, Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter).
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Hepburn won four Academy Awards, for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). Among her other outstanding films are Little Women (1933), Alice Adams (1935), Stage Door (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The African Queen (1951), The Rainmaker (1956), Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), and The Trojan Women (1970). For television she did Love among the Ruins (1975), in which she costarred with Laurence Olivier, and several other productions. Later stage appearences include Coco (1969) and The West Side Waltz (1981).
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African Queen